greenwood parting thoughts

It's hard to choose just a few photos that encapsulate our last full day in Greenwood. But these will have to do. They ask questions and tell stories, so I will just be quiet, and let them speak.

Not far from Robert Johnson's grave is Bryant's Store in Money. It's just a shell now, as you can see. This is the store Emmett Till visited before he was killed. We arrived there as the sun was beginning to set. I was beginning to set as well. Two packed days of so much rich history in the Delta. It will inform my work on book two of the Sixties Trilogy, and perhaps today I can get back to it.  As we arrived home Sunday night, I was officially overwhelmed.

We did indeed scoot home before the storm -- we ran through it in Tuscaloosa and spent a hairy hour threading our way through snow and ice. Then we got out ahead of it and came home to Atlanta just before the storm dropped five inches of snow here. I spent yesterday in a soft white eddy of snow-covered thoughts, spinning my mental wheels, going back to bed here and there, with so much of this story to hold in my head it was impossible to process it all.

But today is a new day. I'm up and atem. Hotlanta is not equipped for snow. The entire town is shut up tight. I have a fire and a pink chair and snapshots and fiction to keep me company. I'm going to work on telling Sunny's story today.

 So much thanks to Marianne Richardson who drove and kept me company and put up with my quirks and answered all my questions, and shared with me her Greenwood, Mississippi. Thanks to Mary Carol Miller and her aunt and uncle, Gray and Tricia Evans. Thanks to Allan Hammons, Carolyn McAdams, Sylvester and Mary Hoover, and, as always, my good friends at Turnrow Books, who always make me feel welcome and who bend over backwards to help me find my story.

Thanks, y'all.

Now it's time to get to work.